Building a Java Web Start Application

While checking out some tutorials of Java on the Oracle website, I discovered that they were using Java Web Start Launcher Applications as demo for the viewers. Basically the applications are JNLP Files ( Java Network Launch Protocol ). For the applications to work, you do need to have Java installed on your system.

The main advantage in using Java Web Start technology is you can deploy independent software on any system over the network. Most of the demos that are offered by Oracle for Java are JNLP files which are powered by Java Web Start Launcher. The JNLP files are mostly governed by a XML schema which defines all of it’s features.

Localhost demo

So, basically we have two files – A JAR file and a JNLP file. The JNLP file acts as the web launcher which runs the JAR application file on the client machine. For a localhost, the following would be the code for a XML file.